During video encoding, an exemplary video stream may be encoded on a frame-by-frame basis, and each frame may be encoded on a macroblock-by-macroblock basis. The MPEG-4 video compression standard may be utilized to encode video information on a macroblock-by-macroblock basis. For example, the MPEG-4 standard specifies the use of spatial prediction, temporal prediction, discrete cosine transformation (DCT), interlaced coding, and lossless entropy coding to compress macroblocks within a video stream. Spatial prediction techniques may be utilized during decoding to estimate pixels based on neighboring pixels. For example, pixels in a current macroblock may be estimated utilizing spatial prediction from pixels within a neighboring macroblock to the top and/or to the left of the current macroblock. Temporal prediction techniques may also be utilized during decoding of an elementary video stream to estimate pixels in a current macroblock based on pixels in different previous or subsequent frames and/or reference pictures.
During decoding of temporally predicted video information, explicit and/or implicit prediction data may be utilized to decode temporally predicted pixels within an elementary video stream. A conventional decoder utilizes separate hardware blocks, including separate memories, to implement temporal prediction of video information based on explicit and implicit prediction data. In addition, explicit prediction data, which may be encoded directly in the elementary video stream, may be acquired from the video stream and communicated to different processing blocks within the decoder for further processing. The utilization of separate hardware processing blocks within a conventional decoder to acquire or generate prediction data and process the acquired or generated prediction data separately to predict each encoded pixel, results in a significant increase in the processing time necessary for decoding an elementary video stream and, therefore, a decrease in the efficiency of the video decoder.
Further limitations and disadvantages of conventional and traditional approaches will become apparent to one of ordinary skill in the art through comparison of such systems with the present invention as set forth in the remainder of the present application with reference to the drawings.